Half the Internet Crashes! World’s Second-Largest Cloud Goes Down Due to a Microsoft Misconfiguration
Major Cloud Outages: AWS and Azure Go Down Back-to-Back
Amazon's AWS outage was barely over before Microsoft Azure went down—sparking widespread concern about what’s happening with the big cloud providers lately.
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Massive Azure Outage Hits Worldwide
Recently, users on X (formerly Twitter), Hacker News, Reddit, and other platforms reported a broad Microsoft Azure outage. Even azure.com and microsoft.com were intermittently inaccessible.
Outage Scope
According to Downdetector:
- Within hours, there were thousands of reports from multiple global regions.
- The incident was large enough to be classified as global.
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Timeline of Microsoft’s Global Disruption
Microsoft confirmed:
- Start: October 29, 2025, at 16:00 UTC (09:00 PT)
- End: October 29, 2025, at 23:20 UTC (16:20 PT)
The Ironic Timing
The outage coincided with Microsoft’s Q1 FY2026 earnings release, which reported:
- Azure revenue up 40% year-over-year
- Azure as the fastest-growing segment
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Services Impacted
Microsoft confirmed outages in:
- Office 365
- Minecraft
- Xbox Live
- Copilot
Azure services affected (partial list):
> App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Azure Maps, Azure Portal, Azure SQL Database, Container Registry, Media Services, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Sentinel, Video Indexer, Virtual Desktop, and more.
Nearly half of Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem was impacted.
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Real-World Business Disruption
Examples:
- Alaska Airlines & Hawaiian Airlines: Online check-in issues, passengers urged to check in at airport counters.
- Helm (Kubernetes Management Tool): ResourceNotFound errors on get.helm.sh.
- Santé Québec (Canada): Patient portal and virtual care platforms offline.
- Retail Giants: Downdetector spikes for Starbucks, Kroger, and Costco.
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Cause: Azure Front Door Misconfiguration
Root Cause Summary:
- Unexpected tenant configuration change in Azure Front Door (CDN service).
- Invalid configuration state caused many nodes to fail.
- Healthy nodes became overloaded → delayed responses, timeouts, connection errors.
Microsoft’s Response
- Blocked all new configuration changes.
- Redeployed the last known good config globally.
- Adopted phased restoration to maintain stability.
- Fixed safeguard mechanisms for deployment validation & rollback.
Downtime Duration: Nearly 9 hours
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The Bigger Picture: Centralization Risk
This wasn’t the first cloud outage of the month:
- A week earlier, AWS had a DNS failure in us-east-1.
- Both AWS & Azure, the market leaders, have now experienced disruptions.
Expert Warnings
- Rohit Chopra, Former FTC Commissioner: High concentration of cloud services is a systemic vulnerability.
- Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint: Even advanced infrastructures have resilience gaps; outages can cost industries tens of millions in hours.
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Strategies for Resilience
As cloud dependency grows:
- Multi-cloud deployment and redundancy are vital.
- Hybrid strategies reduce single points of failure.
Example Tool: AiToEarn
- Open-source AI content monetization platform.
- Cross-platform publishing (Douyin, Kwai, Bilibili, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X/Twitter, etc.).
- Integrated AI generation, analytics, model ranking.
- Reduces reliance on any one infrastructure.
- More info: AiToEarn核心应用 | AiToEarn博客 | AI模型排名.
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References
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Organized by: CSDN
Produced by: CSDN
Republished with permission from the WeChat account “CSDN” (ID: csdnnews).
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